A Dead Man Speaks

by Lisa Jones Johnson

“So what other kind of clients do you have?”

  “I really don’t know what you’re getting at, Detective. I think I’ve fully explained what type of clients we have. There’s really nothing else to say.”

  “Oh, I think there is.”

  He quickly glanced away.

  “Did your firm, that is your and Mr. January’s firm, ever have any client accounts that could’ve been risky? The kind you wouldn’t necessarily want anybody to know you had?”

  Haven remained silent. His lawyer looked straight ahead.

  “Mr. Haven?”

  “Detective, Mr. January and I divided up the firm responsibilities in a way so that he was responsible for overseeing the trades and getting new business. I ran the firm’s own portfolio and oversaw the day to day operations.”

  I slowed down, cocking my head in his direction. “In other words, you’re saying that you wouldn’t know if there were any of these questionable kind of accounts ’cause that’s what January handled.”

  “That’s correct, Detective.”

  Like hell, I thought, this cat would know what side of the bed Clive January got up on in the morning. Nothing, and I mean nothing, would pass him by. “So you’d like me to believe that you and Mr. January never discussed new firm business, or what you were doing for who? Seems like a kinda odd way to run a partnership.”

  He didn’t flinch. “It worked.”

  “So how about now? Since January’s dead and all, who runs the part of the business that he took care of, all the stuff that you, of course, didn’t know nothing about before?”

  “I do. I run everything.”

  “Seems like a lotta work for one man.”

  “I manage.” That bitchiness is coming out. I see why Clive liked to fuck with him.

  “Well you really are something, Mr. Haven. And you mean that you’ve been able to come up to speed on all the shit that January handled in just a month?”

  “I do have an organization behind me, Detective. It’s not like I’m doing everything myself.”

  I wandered around the room, and then stopped, looking him dead in the eye. “But you just said that you do…do everything yourself, that is.”

  He fidgeted. “I meant that I oversee everything. It would be impossible to be hands on with everything.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” I sat on the edge of the table. “Well I guess that’s all for now.”

  Visibly relieved, Haven readied to leave.

  “Oh, one more thing. Did January ever talk to you about selling the business?” If I had kicked him in the gut, he probably wouldn’tve looked more pained.

  “No, never,” he said tightly. “The firm was an institution, the only one of its kind on the street. He’d never sell it.” He stopped for a second. “We’d never sell it.”

  I decided to ignore the last statement and continue with my train of thought. “But if he had sold it, you would’ve just cashed out your stock and gone about your business…I assume…or is that not the right assumption, Mr. Haven?”

  His lawyer raised his eyebrows, then nodded for Haven to go ahead and answer the question.

  “It would be a little more complicated than that, but basically, that’s what would have happened.”

  “I see…Well, so no matter what Mr. January had decided to do with the firm, you woulda been fine, ’cause of your having stock in the company and everything.”

  Something kept telling me to hammer away at that point of who really owned the company. Not that I couldn’t find out myself, but I just wanted to see Haven’s reaction. I knew sorta instinctively that this was gonna hit a raw nerve with Haven.

  “Damn it, Detective. I don’t know if this is what you call effective police work, but I call it harassment. I’ve answered the same question three times now. How many—”

  His lawyer jumped in. I think he could see that this whole thing was heading south for his client. “Andrew, why don’t you just answer the detective’s question one more time?”

  Haven sucked in his breath, spitting the words out angrily. “If he sold the firm, I would’ve been fine, Detective. Just fine.”

  “Well that’s all I wanted to know.”

  I leaned over tying my shoe. “I guess I’m done now, Mr. Haven.”

  Haven was still shaking, glaring at me. “When will you be returning my files? I can’t exactly run a business with all of my records at the police station.”

  I turned my back on him. I got this sick pleasure with fucking with this pompous asshole. Yeah, I could definitely see why Clive liked to fuck with him. “When I’m finished, Mr. Haven. When I’m good and finished. And not until.”

  * * *

  Boxes, boxes. Shit, by the look of things I’d never be finished going through all of this. And the worst thing was that I really didn’t have a clue what I was looking for. Accounts, some kind of illegal accounts, but how would I tell the difference between what was legal and illegal? I didn’t know shit about the securities business. My head was starting to ache, and I was beginning to feel that urge to go in the bottom drawer in my desk and pull out my stash of Jack that I kept in the iced tea bottle.

  Maybe if I wasn’t on such fucked-up terms with all the other cops in the force I’d been able to ask somebody for some help. But those days were long gone now. At this point it was just me, and this big room full of boxes that I had to go through without the faintest idea of what I was really looking for.

  I pulled out the First Pacific Securities file. Sounded legal to me. I put it in the “okay” pile. Conway Capital Corp—legal. Hell, who was I fooling? These could all be fronts, and I wouldn’t know the difference.

  I shook myself awake. I don’t know how long it had been since I dozed off. I’d shut the door so nobody would come in, but as I opened one eye painfully, trying to scrape the sleep off from my eyelids, I saw Margie. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pile of files on one side of her and a large grey book open on her lap.

  Without looking up, she said, “Things were slow in the file room, so I asked the Captain if I could help you in here. He said he didn’t give a damn, so I guessed that meant yes.”

  I tried to pull myself together quickly and say something, but she just kept talking.

  “I have a copy of Gray’s pension fund and insurance company lists. I remember using it when I worked for Larry Stein at Merrill. I figured that any clients that January’s firm would be trading stocks for would have to be either insurance companies or pension funds. They might also be rich investors, but I thought I’d start with the obvious things first.”

  I was really too stunned to say much, but she kept talking anyway, so it didn’t matter.

  “So far I’ve gone through about five boxes. I’ve separated all the files into the ones on Gray’s list and the ones not on Gray’s list.”

  I looked over in amazement at the two neat piles in front of her. One about twice as high as the other one.

  “Which pile is which?”

  “The tall are the accounts on the list, the shorter are the ones not on the list.”

  “Shit.” That’s all I could think of to say ’cause the truth is, I don’t know what I would’ve done if Margie hadn’t shown up. “Margie.”

  She looked up with the sweetest and cutest Laura Petrie smile. Fresh, just like the first time that we met. I wanted to run over and hug and kiss her. “Thanks.”

  She smiled.

  * * *

  “Well that’s it…all the boxes.”

  I looked at the two neat piles. “So how many are not on that Gray’s list?”

  She quickly counted the files on the smaller list. “Twenty.”

  “So that means we got twenty possibilities.”

  “Yes, except that some of them may be S&Ls or rich investors so we can still probably narrow it down…”

  “My guess is that one of those rich guys might be the account we’re looking for.”

  “Well you’re the detective, and I’m just the rookie cop. So
whatever you think is probably right.” I could tell when she was teasing, but for some reason it didn’t bother me. I think I was just so grateful for her help that I could put up with about anything.

  I sat down in front of the piles. My eyes scanned the names…L&M securities, Red Dog investments, that sounded like a code word…but who knew.

  “You know the sick thing is that what we’re looking for is probably not even in these files. They probably had that account on the computer and Haven erased it right after January died, or if he didn’t do it then, he probably has now that he realizes I’m sniffing around for it.”

  I sat on the floor wearily. My head began aching again. The high I’d felt a minute ago started to seep away with the realization that all this work was probably meaningless. “The one person who probably knows everything, the assholes around here can’t even find. You’d think she’s a pro the way she’s been able to slip away.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “January’s girlfriend. She’s the key. The mail for these accounts came to her place.”

  Margie could still sense my moods ’cause she came up behind me and started massaging my shoulders like she used to do. It felt good. I wanted her to keep on going.

  Just as I was really starting to get into the rhythm, she stopped. “I better go.”

  I turned to her a little surprised. “You don’t have to. We could grab some dinner. I’m buying.”

  She looked away, not meeting my gaze and then quickly picked up her purse. “I can’t tonight. I’ve got to be somewhere.”

  “Oh.” That’s really all I could say. But the funny thing is that I wasn’t mad like I’d normally be. I think I was starting to understand things a little better. “Well, have a good time.”

  She smiled at me as she left. I knew that she understood how hard it had been for me not to say anything else. Maybe I needed to be more like that kid at CCNY and just let things go instead of breaking bad in everybody’s face all the time.

  Before I had time to really let these new thoughts sink in, the door burst open and a cop stuck his head in the door. “Yo, Greene, that guy you wanted us to track down…Lani Hillgrove, he lives in Queens.” The cop handed me a sheet of paper with all the info on Hillgrove. He was a supervisor in the post office, home address, phone number. Bayside Queens. I knew the area real well. It was my first beat as a cop.

  I stuck the paper in my pocket. “You sure this is the right guy?”

  “Married to a Laurel Davenport in 1972, divorced 1980. How many Lani Hillgrove’s fit that description? Give us a little credit, okay, Greene?”

  For once I felt like I was being the asshole instead of them, but no need of letting him know that. I just smiled kinda sheepishly. “Yeah sure…Thanks.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Neat houses, paint peeling a little, postage stamp-sized lawns, people who worked hard and led largely uneventful lives. I checked the address. It matched a pale, yellow-frame house. The grass was neatly cut, and there was one of those black jockey statues at the end of the cracked brick walkway leading to the door.

  I was about to knock when the door swung open. A big, light-skinned black man stood in front of me. Or at least I think he was black. His eyes were blue, and his hair was as straight as mine, but his lips were so full and broad it made me think he must be black. I didn’t have time to think much else before he blurted out. “Can I help you?”

  I took out my badge and opened it in his face. “Detective Greene, NYPD. I’m looking for a Lani Hillgrove.”

  He didn’t move. “What’s your business?”

  “Are you Lani Hillgrove?”

  “Like I said, what’s your business?”

  “I’m investigating a murder, and I think that your ex-wife may be involved.”

  “And who says I’m Lani Hillgrove, Detective?”

  The contemptuous way he said my name made me think of the guys at the station. “You do, ’cause I’m pretty damn sure that if you weren’t him you’d a told me that to begin with.”

  Hillgrove looked at me suspiciously, but didn’t say anything for a moment. I was gonna let him talk first. I figured he’d say something or do something that I could use. “Okay, Detective, what do you want to know?”

  “More than we can talk about out here.”

  He looked like he was about to say something, but then he caught himself and stepped aside, letting me walk through the door. Inside the place was dark, almost oppressive. I could see why Laurel split from this guy. Everything around him seemed heavy and burdened down with some unspeakable secrets.

  He sat down heavily on the brown plaid couch. He was a big guy, must’ve weighed at least 250, thick arms and wide legs. I wondered again why she’d ever marry somebody like this. He cut through my thoughts again. “What did you mean when you said Laurel was involved in some murder?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  He cracked his knuckles and frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “If it surprises me. That’s what you wanted to know wasn’t it?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. If he wasn’t gonna be cooperative, I wasn’t coming up off anything either. I took out my notebook and flipped to a blank page. “So, Mr. Hillgrove, how did you meet your ex-wife?”

  “In a shopping mall outside Greensboro. She was working at the information booth, and I came to ask her a question. She was kinda cute, so we just kept talking. Before I knew it, we’d made plans to get together for coffee after she left work.”

  “Sounds like it moved pretty fast.”

  “That was her way,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “So go on. You dated for a while. How long exactly?

  “About three months, then one day she just upped and said she wanted to get married.”

  “So you did?”

  “Yeah, I guess I was ready. I’d been to Nam, done my tour and was back pretty much okay. I finished up school, had a pretty good job with the state, so I figured…hey why not?”

  “What kind of wedding was it? I mean did she have her family, close friends?”

  “No, that was kind of the odd thing. She didn’t have anybody there. I wanted to meet her people, but she said they had died, and she didn’t have any close friends. We just went to the Justice of the Peace one Saturday and did it.”

  “After you got married, how was she?”

  He leaned back on the couch. “She was…like… the perfect wife…cooked dinner every night, washed my clothes…did everything right, but it was almost too perfect. Sometimes I felt kinda like she was trying to convince herself that she could do it. Sort of like she was practicing for the real thing.”

  “The real thing?”

  “Yeah, sometimes I felt like I was a dry run.” He reached over to a little dish and took a piece of butterscotch candy out, unwrapped it and started sucking on it noisily.

  “What made you think that?”

  “A lot of little things, but mainly something that happened one day. We’d been married a couple of years and things were going okay, or at least I thought so.” The sofa squeaked as he shifted his large frame. “I got home kinda early one day, and she was home. She’d quit her job, said she wanted to have more time to be a good wife…but anyway, she didn’t hear me when I came in, and she was cutting out things from a magazine. Well when I asked her what it was, she tried to hide it, but I’d already seen.”

  “What was it?”

  “All kinds of articles from those Brides magazines, pictures of wedding dresses, where to go on your honeymoon, all that kind of thing.”

  “Well maybe it was for you?”

  He opened another piece of candy and stuffed it in his mouth. “We’d been married two or three years then, so I know it wasn’t for us. Plus when she saw I’d snuck up on her, she tried to hide everything and pretend like she was doing it for a friend.”

  I took all of it down. “Did you divorce right after that?”

  “
No, it was a few years later. We’d been separated, until one day she just showed up on my doorstep saying she wanted a divorce, and she needed it right away.”

  I was thinking that must’ve been when she disappeared, and then showed up again too late to marry Clive. “Did you ask her why she needed it so quick?”

  He sighed like he’d rather forget the whole thing. “By that time, I didn’t give a damn anymore. I was ready to be finished with her. Only thing is that I wanted to make sure that it was legal. I didn’t want any problems. She wanted to go to Vegas and do it there, but I insisted on getting a lawyer and doing it right. She wasn’t happy about it because it took a lot longer than she thought it would.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “Musta been about six months. But at least I knew it would stick.”

  “So you were married, what three, four years before you separated. Did you ever think about kids?”

  “I wanted kids, but I don’t think she really did. She had this little dog, a cute little Irish terrier. His name was Randy. That dog was pretty much all the kid she ever wanted. She just doted on him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He shook his head. “It was the strangest thing. She loved that dog more than anything, but the apartment we were in didn’t allow pets. First the landlord was okay about it, but some of the neighbors started complaining about him barking, so the landlord told us we had to move. But we couldn’t move because we’d lose our security deposit, and since she wasn’t working then, we just couldn’t afford it. So the dog had to go.”

  He cracked his knuckles again, coughing nervously. “I thought she’d just give the dog away. One of my friends wanted him, and she’d said okay. I thought that’s what she’d done, but then I found out that…” he shifted in his seat again, “she’d had the dog put to sleep. “

  “Why?”

  “When I asked her, she just got real cold and said that she did it because nobody else could’ve loved him the way she did.”

  Back at the station, I knew now, more than ever that I had to find Laurel. And for once I think that somebody upstairs must’ve heard me, ’cause the minute I got to my desk, a cop called out, “I think we found that chick you’ve been looking for…Davenport, Laurel Davenport. She’s in a little town outside Woodstock, under an alias.”